Good mosfet for Arduino or Raspberry Pi

Hi Joey, Check out the NTD4906 N Ch Enh MOSFET. This has a logic level gate and will handle 30 Volts. It is surface mount SOT-223. I have used these with the Arduino and the output has no problem pushing the MOSFET to full saturation. They will also handle decent current loads.

John

Thanks John, I will look into this.  At first sight, they are quite a bit more expensive for some reason, running from .60 to $1 USD each!  Stark contrast to others I am looking at that go for about .10 USD each.  That will be a factor as I need to control 30 LEDs.

Hi Joey,

Yes if you are running one LED per MOSFET then they are over kill as they each will handle up to 50 amps if properly heat sunk. I will do a little research to see if I can find a chip with more than one MOSFET in the package. For your application I think that would be the ticket as it would minimize extra space and weight. I assume these will be on something that flies.

John

Do you know anything about the ones I posted?

Hi Joey,

No I have no personal experience with the 2N7002 but here is the data sheet for it:

http://datasheet.octopart.com/2N7002-Fairchild-datasheet-8473128.pdf

Also you might want to check out the site where I got the datasheet, called Octopart as they have a lot of parts listings along with availability from supply houses and most of the time data sheets that can be downloaded. I like to use them instead of all the garbage sites on the web searches. Here is the Link for Octopart.

https://octopart.com/

John

Hi Joey, I looked over the data sheet and the 2N 7002 are logic level MOSFETs. The voltage (ds) 60 volts looks good for use with your 12 volt circuit. However, the current that you mentioned 500mA to 1 Amp is a lot more than the 2N7002's 200 mW rating. If you are using bright 12 volt LEDs you will be wise to have a MOSFET that is rated 1.5 to 2 times higher power handling than actual. You mentioned the need for 30 of these MOSFETS and if you are going to draw 500 mA to 1 A per unit this is a lot of power.  If this is a portable application you will need a serious battery to supply 15 to 30 amps at 12 volts for any reasonable amount of time.

John

John Sorry, I mislead you.  I have a project where a single LED may pull .5 to 1A, but there will be only 4 of those.

For the 30 or so LED I want to power, I put an 68 ohm resistor on it and I got it to light off at 6V and 12V using 10ma and 20ma respectively.  So the mosfets I mentioned will work for these.

For the bigger LEDs I can swing your diode or I can use a few min parallel.  Thanks for this input on the datasheets.

Joey